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'Hey,' Bebe! 'Mama' singer gets due credit

Patrick Ryan, USA TODAY
Published 12:41 p.m. ET June 23, 2015

Bebe Rexha poses at the Vans Warped Tour kickoff at Club Nokia on April 7, 2015, in Los Angeles. She is currently at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart with David Guetta's "Hey Mama," featuring Nicki Minaj and Afrojack.(Photo: Chelsea Lauren, WireImage)

Bebe Rexha has one of the biggest songs of the summer, but until recently, you never would've known it.

The pop up-and-comer sings the hypnotic chorus of David Guetta's Hey Mama, which peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and has sold 1.1 million downloads so far, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Included on his latest album, Listen, Guetta released the sexy dance track as a single this spring — only Rexha's name wasn't listed alongside other featured artists Nicki Minaj and Afrojack.

Rexha penned Hey Mama last year with songwriter Sean Douglas (aka Michael Keaton's son), and was later asked by Guetta's camp to record the chorus and background vocals. But when she requested "to be featured, they said it'd be too many features on one song, because most EDM songs only have one or two," Rexha, 25, says. As a result, Rexha wasn't credited when the track first appeared on iTunes, Spotify or YouTube.

The slight felt like a major setback for Rexha, who sang the chorus of another EDM hit, Cash Cash's Take Me Home, last spring, and has written songs for Eminem (The Monster), Madonna (Some Girls) and Selena Gomez (Like a Champion).

"I had my little tantrum moment, I'm not going to lie, because I am an artist and when people hear your song on the radio and nobody knows it's you, it really (sucks)," Rexha says. Having been in the business for a decade now, "I know what it takes, and you have to fight for yourself and what you believe in."

After talking to Guetta (and involving her lawyer), Rexha's name has finally been listed with the others, and she since performed the song with Guetta and Minaj at the iHeartRadio Pool Party in Las Vegas last month. (In a statement to USA TODAY, Guetta's management said, "Initially, Bebe was happy and agreed to be credited as a writer. When she changed her mind, after the record was released, we changed the credits immediately.")

"In the end, it's all love," says Rexha, who's currently finishing her debut album and will tour with Nick Jonas this fall. "I would've loved the feature from the beginning, but I got what I wanted, so I'm happy."

The female pop trio topped the charts with Hold On and Release Me in the '90s, but recently recorded backing vocals for the folk-pop FourFiveSeconds after West reached out to their manager. In the studio, "he was really shy" and "real soft-spoken, then all of a sudden ... he was dancing around the room," singer Carnie Wilson told Billboard in March. From there, he let them take the song off-site to work on their harmonies. "He gave us sole freedom to just do what we do," Wilson continued. "We just went in there and let loose."

Kesha didn't become a household name until fall 2009 with party-girl anthem Tik Tok, but earlier that year, she could be heard singing the sticky-sweet chorus of No. 1 smash Right Round. "I didn't get credit, I didn't get paid. Honestly, I walked into the studio and there was Flo Rida and Dr. Luke doing the song," Kesha told Entertainment Weekly in 2010. "I believe in karma, so if I'm not a douchebag about that, it'll just come back to me. So it's like, 'You know what, if you don't want to pay me, it's fine. I'm excited to have my voice on the radio.' "

Avicii shot to No. 4 on the Hot 100 with country-fried EDM track Wake Me Up! in summer 2013, thanks in part to the soulful voice of then-newcomer Aloe Blacc (who also co-wrote the track). Talking to Billboard later that year about his anonymous vocals, Blacc said that "it's bittersweet for the fans' sake. ... But I like the discovery. When I was a young kid, I loved the song called Somebody's Watching Me (by Rockwell), and I had no idea until much later that my favorite singer, Michael Jackson, was singing on the chorus. So you never know."

Apparently, the White Duke likes Canadian indie rock just as much as you do. Bowie joined the Grammy-winning band onstage for a performance of song Wake Up in 2005, but also "supplied a brief backing vocal" on disco-inspired single Reflektor when it was released in September 2013, according to a Facebook post. Coming by the studio while they were mixing, Bowie "offered to lend us his services because he really liked the song," band member Richard Reed Perry told NME at the time. "In fact, he basically threatened us – he was like, 'If you don't hurry up and mix this song, I might just steal it from you!' "

The second single from Jay Z's 2001 The Blueprint album already featured rappers Q-Tip, Biz Markie and Slick Rick, but got an extra boost of background vocals from the King of Pop himself, the hip-hop titan revealed in a 2009 op-ed for NME paying tribute to the late singer. "I didn't even put his name on it," Jay Z wrote. "I remember him calling me and him just talking about, you know, 'syncopation' and musician stuff like that. The Michael Jackson I knew was just a musician who loved music." (Warning: Contains some NSFW language.)